1. Field
The present disclosure pertains generally to the field of signal processing solutions used to improve voice quality in communication systems, and more specifically, to techniques of exploiting multiple microphones to improve the quality of voice communications.
2. Background
In mobile communication systems, the quality of transmitted voice is an important factor in the overall quality of service experienced by users. In recent times, some mobile communication devices (MCDs) have included multiple microphones in the MCD to improve the quality of the transmitted voice. In these MCDs, advanced signal processing techniques that exploit audio information from multiple microphones are used to enhance the voice quality and suppress background noise. However, these solutions generally require that the multiple microphones are all located on the same MCD. Known examples of multi-microphone MCDs include cellular phone handsets with two or more microphones and Bluetooth wireless headsets with two microphones.
The voice signals captured by microphones on MCDs are highly susceptible to environmental effects such as background noise, reverberation and the like. MCDs equipped with only a single microphone suffer from poor voice quality when used in noisy environments, i.e., in environments where the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of an input voice signal is low. To improve operability in noisy environments, multi-microphone MCDs were introduced. Multi-microphone MCDs process audio captured by an array of microphones to improve voice quality even in hostile (highly noisy) environments. Known multiple microphone solutions can employ certain digital signal processing techniques to improve voice quality by exploiting audio captured by the different microphones located on an MCD.